Foundational distributed electronic markets development team close round to scale the team and build commercial solutions
New York, NY (May 13, 2019) — Agoric today announced the successful completion of their latest investment round with an impressive array of global investors including gumi Cryptos Capital, Interchain Foundation (Cosmos), Kilowatt Capital, Lemniscap, MetaStable Capital, Outlier Ventures, Rockaway Blockchain, Xpring (Ripple), and others, joining initial seed investors Electric Coin Company, Naval Ravikant, and Polychain.
Agoric will bring the millions of programmers worldwide the ability to safely build smart contracts and new digital assets using a secure subset of JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language. This will enable new forms of global economic activity and cooperation that have previously been impossible or infeasible.
The investment follows the 2018 technology validation, and fundamental development on cross-chain interoperability and integrations, moving the technology rapidly toward commercialization. With this new backing, Agoric will double in size, to scale the engineering function and grow the business development team to prepare for go-to-market activities. The initial priority is to deliver the test net and build out interoperability with top-tier next-generation decentralized projects. The team is also actively recruiting reference implementation partners from key verticals, including financial services organizations.
Mark Miller, Chief Scientist, states: “In recent years, smart contracts have been prone to a number of extremely expensive errors that have been made even by real experts working incredibly hard to do it right. Programming smart contracts in the way the industry does it now is just too hard and too hazard-prone, and the losses are too great. This is a huge problem and one that needs to be fixed”.
Agoric builds on the seminal Agoric Open Systems work for market-based, distributed computation, written by Chief Scientist Dr. Mark Miller and Dr. K. Eric Drexler in 1988. Miller is a former Google research scientist and sits on the global JavaScript “TC39” technical standards committee. Chief Executive, E. Dean Tribble is a former Principal Architect at Microsoft and is an entrepreneur with multiple successful projects including VerifyValid (acquired by Deluxe Corporation) and Agorics (acquired by Microsoft). The team includes institutional economists as well as leaders and executives with experience earned at companies including Mozilla, AMiX, IBM, and Time Warner Cable (acquired by Charter Communications).
Chief Executive, E. Dean Tribble added: “Creating secure smart contracts using today’s technology is inherently difficult. Agoric includes robust security properties beyond anything available today, and it will provide that security across substrates, from local machines to global blockchains. The implications for secure development of blockchains, cross-chain compatibility, and the future economic opportunities that this will unlock means this is a vitally important development in contract technology”.
“The Agoric vision is to unlock the potential of smart contracts, not only for bleeding-edge experts but also for millions of mainstream programmers. The Agoric team is uniquely right for this great task, and I’m proud to support them.” Zooko Wilcox, CEO of the Electric Coin Company (makers of Zcash)
Zaki Manian, Director of Research at All In Bits (Cosmos) stated: “The prior work of the Agoric founders was one of the key inspirations for the architecture of the Cosmos Network. As we work on releasing the first version of inter-blockchain communication protocol, we expect that Agoric’s smart contract and digital asset architecture will enable trillions of dollars in assets to be managed by networks of blockchains.”
Ethan Beard, SVP of Xpring (Ripple) said: “Agoric is an incredible team delivering secure smart contracts that work across multiple blockchains. At Xpring, we believe in interoperability at the infrastructure level and are excited to support Agoric on their launch.”
Chief Executive Tribble concluded: “We thank our supporters and investors for their belief in the project, and we are now looking forward to rolling this technology out in the coming months, with our new and existing partners”.
Additional commentary
Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, Head of Research at Outlier Ventures commented: “The opportunity for smart contracts to be delivered in Javascript, the world’s most popular programming language with millions and millions of developers, and used by every major corporation globally will open a whole new set of business and financial transaction capabilities to enable new models of economic activity to emerge“.
Miko Matsumura, General Partner at gumi Cryptos said: “Smart contracts automate Enterprise transaction systems and extend the API economy. Agoric providing secure JavaScript will accelerate Enterprise adoption of smart contracts by a thousand-fold.
Dusan Kovacic, Chief Investment Officer at Rockaway Blockchain added: “We can see a lot of teams building new smart contract platforms with only marginal incremental improvements to the existing ecosystem. This, however, is not Agoric’s case. Dean and his team are striving to improve the space by one full generation. Agoric brings capabilities of object-oriented design into the smart contract world not available today. Traditional developers will be able to include smart contract features into their products without the need for extensive learning and coding paradigm shifts.”
